for popular debates concerning religion and valuable for work in both religious studies and Hume studies. I defend against the somewhat oxymoronic reading that Hume’s true religion has no religious merit.
Contemporary Scholars on Hume
Scholarly work on the Enlightenment era takes Hume’s critique of autonomous reason as the basis for his skepticism and construes his discontent with popular religion as grounds for his atheism.9 These common interpretations overlook Hume’s clearly stated desire to build a science, mask the degree to which Hume despised dogmatism and atheism, and, finally, disguise his method of empirical observation, his sense of subjective dispositions, and his emphasis on probable conclusions. Two very basic examples of this tendency from general studies of the Enlightenment are Peter Gay’s insights, which overemphasize Hume’s critical project in religion and position him as the poster child for paganism; and Carl Becker’s thesis that Enlightenment thinkers were invested in substituting the concept of heaven with the idea of posterity, which misplaces Hume’s constructive project in service of that end.10 Hume was critical of autonomous, objective, and ahistorical reason, yet he was neither a pagan as Gay argues, nor an advocate of posterity as Becker suggests.
Scholars who have made valuable and highly visible contributions in Hume studies for the last twenty years—particularly Peter Millican, Janet Broughton, and Galen Strawson—mention but do not focus on Hume’s bifurcated approach to religion. Terence Penelhum and Keith Yandell, two noted scholars that closely attend to Hume’s epistemology, do treat his philosophy of religion.11 Both thinkers read Hume’s religious writings filtered through his theory of ideas as articulated in the Treatise and first Enquiry. Their detailed analyses emphasize his critique of the rational foundations of religion, the contradictions and inconsistencies of his statements on religious belief, how his theory of belief fits or does not fit into his theory of ideas, his use of irony and sense of theism, and the “absence or near-absence of positive psychological considerations” for religion in his work.12 Penelhum and Yandell have greatly improved our understanding of Hume’s philosophy of religion in important ways. Their conclusions, however, pay scant attention to the role of his philosophical writings for the possibility of genuine theism, and they do not discuss the passional grounds of religion. Thus they largely preclude using Hume as a constructive resource for contemporary debates in religion and underestimate the value of his category ‘true religion.’ Overall, their work reflects a larger trend: to position Hume as generally irreligious.
Two recent contributions, Paul Russell’s The Riddle of Hume’s “Treatise”: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion and Thomas Holden’s Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism, follow in the trajectory of work by Penelhum and Yandell in that they directly explore religious dimensions of Hume’s thought. These works are immensely valuable. Russell’s well-developed argument for Hume’s “irreligion” is compelling, but he discusses only Hume’s Treatise and says little about religion’s proper office.13 Holden’s text is also nicely argued and quite persuasive. It attends to the entirety of Hume’s corpus and argues for Hume’s moral atheism. Both books largely overlook Hume’s bifurcated approach to religion and confirm the popular philosophical bias to use Hume’s arguments as a resource against religion instead of as a means to reconceive it. Perhaps there is a hidden agenda in the common move by philosophers to emphasize Hume’s critique of religion and avoid the plethora of possibilities generated by his explicit belief that religion is coterminous with human life. More likely, this approach reflects an outdated way of conceiving religion that largely has been abandoned by scholars in religious studies. What Russell reads as Hume’s irreligion is simply Hume’s undermining of orthodox Christian deity and Biblical religion. Similarly, Holden reduces moral atheism to Hume’s belief that the conventional Christian God and moral worldview are not the sources of our moral norms. It does not follow, from either Russell’s or Holden’s argument, that Hume was against religion at all times and in all forms. Hume was explicit about this. He was against ‘vulgar’ ways of thinking about religion, shunned the beliefs of popular religion, and challenged the grounds of conventional Christianity. Russell and Holden have illuminated new ways of thinking about Hume’s critique of religion. They are not useful resources, however, for the generative work to be done in the philosophy of religion.
To be fair, Yandell, Penelhum, Holden, and Russell do not intend their work to be a resource for constructive work in religious studies. This effort is the domain of religious studies scholars who take religion as a broad and complicated human enterprise always mixed with beauty and terror. At their best, scholars in the study of religion begin with the implicit understanding that religion is not entirely exhausted by the variety of its historical appearances. Thus, they assess various worldviews that have expansive concepts of deities (e.g., Wicca and nontheistic religions such as Buddhism), moral systems independent of theism, and nonceremonial approaches to the world with one eye on history and another on the future. Attending to certain ideas and practices as religious in this way is a means of investigating the wide range of human symbolic activities that some Westerners have denoted as sacred over time and anticipating ways in which these imaginative constructions might shift in content and outcome for the future. Broadly speaking, it is these sorts of interests that often fuel some of the most useful work in the study of religion, and Hume’s constructive interventions have been left out of this conversation. This book aspires, in part, to revive his work in light of these interests. My hunch, as I began thinking about Hume in this way, was that reading his work with this kind of investment might yield something useful for discourse in religious studies. Building on the work of Hume scholars, I link Donald Livingston’s idea of “general providence,” Joseph Godfrey’s notion of moderate “fundamental hope,” and Annette Baier’s sense of Hume’s “practical morality,” to argue that it does and that these are the likely pillars that constitute religion’s “proper office.”14
J. C. A. Gaskin and Antony Flew have treated Hume’s religious thought in detail and in connection with his philosophical investments. They contend that Hume is neither a skeptic nor an atheist yet they allow for an “attenuated deism,” a set of “natural beliefs,” and a category called “true religion” in his work.15 Like Penelhum and Yandell (and Russell and Holden), Gaskin and Flew convincingly present Hume’s critical disposition regarding religion: he attributed negative value to its historical manifestations; he strongly argued against central tenets of conventional Christianity (namely, miracles and a particular providence); he made powerful criticisms of superstition and enthusiasm; and he showed little regard for the traditional conceptions of the divine. Unlike Penelhum and Yandell, Gaskin and Flew read across Hume’s entire corpus (including his History of England and his letters) and represent his thought on religion in its diversity. Their presentation of the breadth of Hume’s thought regarding religion gives readers a way to loosen the grip of skeptical interpretations that dog Hume’s reputation. Still, their obsession with Hume’s treatment of the design argument suggests they equate religion with theism and confirms that their interpretive lens for theism is constrained by an orthodox notion of theism that, by definition, fatefully consigns Hume’s perspective to irreligion.16 I rely on many of the insights provided by Flew and Gaskin. Gaskin’s tendency, however, to miss the value of Hume’s moral thought for his true religion, as well as Flew’s phenomenalist reading of Hume, delimit their potential to effectively situate him for constructive work in the philosophy of religion.17
Scholarship on Hume that places his commitment to history and nature within his broad framework and takes his philosophical, historical, and religious works seriously provides us with the best sense of his mostly implicit suggestion for religion. This is the method deployed by Donald Livingston and Annette Baier, in very different ways. Baier’s work venerates the complicated role that the passions and history play in Hume’s moral thought, while Livingston’s masterful treatment of Hume explicitly confirms Hume’s investment in both true philosophy and true religion.18 Both thinkers show an acute awareness that Hume was not a dogmatic atheist and that he was primarily invested in philosophy (that is, rational reflection) for social effects: to improve
